An online Kickstarter campaign — and 21-year-old Caitlin Nielson — recently came together to bring New Bern a bit of operatic art and a whole lot of history.

Over the weekend, Ratio Theatre brought the children’s opera “Brundibár” to town, performing it with a large cast of children and several musicians.

The play “is a simple fable,” Joey Infinito, director of the company, said. But “the history is more significant than the story itself.”

Nielson is not a native of New Bern. She’s the daughter of an Air Force man, so she has moved around some in her life. But, as she said, “I’ve been here the longest, so this is home.”

Now 21, she has been involved in local theater since she was 13 years old. She has worked both on stage and behind it, doing everything but producing and directing for Rivertowne, the Civic Theatre and Ratio. Her first experience was doing stage work for “Grease” when Judy Long directed it for the Civic Theatre in 2006.

She took time to attend East Carolina University and left school, returning to New Bern in 2011.

“Ratio called and asked me to stage manage ‘Doubt,’” she said, a play by John Patrick Shanley that has also been produced as a movie starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. She has been involved in numerous Ratio productions since then.

“I wanted to give something back,” she said.

Nielson holds down two jobs, working with Edible Arrangements and Micky Milligans. But it was a “small inheritance” she received that brought her to decide to give Ratio a special gift.

Ratio Theatre had decided to use the public online fundraising Kickstarter page to see if it could come up with the money it needed to perform “Brundibár.” It set up a goal of $2,000.

“The royalties are pretty expensive for this little show and also we have a small orchestra that we have to pay,” Andrea Owens, managing director of the company, stated.

Owens believes that Ratio is the first local theater group to use the Kickstarter option.

“When I saw that Ratio was doing Kickstarter, I thought that was great,” Nielson said, adding that she was attracted to the production.

“It’s a children’s show,” she said. “It’s an opera which I think people forget is an important part of theater.”

So she entered her gift of $1,000, and Ratio leaders noticed.

“Joey (Infinito) and I were just so impressed that such a young person made such a major contribution,” Owens said. “We spend a lot of time talking to groups about the importance of supporting the arts, not only for our town’s growth but also for the education of our children. To have this young person step up like that just floored us.”

Page 2 of 2 - In addition to Nielson’s gift, other supporters came up with smaller donations that totaled an additional $1,100.

Nielson said that, for her large donation, “I get my name on everything,” along with a video copy of the production, T-shirt and signed poster. “But giving money is its own reward.”

About the show

“Brundibár” was written by Hans Krasa, a Jew, and was performed, oddly enough, at a Nazi concentration camp for Jews in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, during World War II.

The play served both the Jews who performed and wrote it and the Nazis who presented it to the world.

Germany, anxious to hide the Holocaust from the world, had built Theresienstadt as a model concentration camp to present to the Red Cross and other observers. Designed like a model city full of music, it included grandstands, shops and playgrounds. “Brundibár,” performed by 55 Jewish children, was presented as a showcase entertainment. The dupe worked, with the world at least briefly accepting that this was how the Jews in concentration camps were treated.

The opera is about two children and their animal friends (including a sparrow, a cat, a dog and a monkey) who overcome an evil organ grinder named Brundibár.

“It was our way to fight the devil,” Handra Droni, who had once played the dog, said in the broadcast interview.

Unknown to the world, thousands of camp prisoners were sent off to Auschwitz and other death camps, including many of the performers and the author Krasa himself, who would be gassed sometime in 1944. More than 30,000 also died of starvation and sickness at Theresienstadt.

Dita Krause, who played the cat when she was 12, reminisced for “60 Minutes” about the friends and others who had performed — and went on to die at the Nazis’ hands. Among them were the popular boy who played the lead character.

“So few of them survived,” she said. “And they were so talented. And so many wonderful children among them, promising children. Children that would have become poets and artists and so many of them. They’re all gone. For nothing.”